The Future of Browsers

The final session of the day is a panel on the future of the
browser. On the panel are Joshua Allen of Microsoft,
Mike Shaver of Mozilla, and
Nick Baum of Google. Noticeably missing are Opera (excused due to
distance) and Apple (absent without excuse). Douglas Crockford, of
Javascript fame, is the moderator.

Douglas asks is the add-on the best model for letting users solve
their frustrations with the lack of capability in a browser. Joshua
talks about Microsoft's goal to move toward extensibility through Web
standards where ever possible and get away from native apps. Mike
says that add-ons solve the problem of having multiple special
purpose applications. The browser allows a piece of software to
accompany the user on the Web as part of the browser experience.

Mike says there will be convergence on similar functionality but
doesn't think there will be a common set of touch points for all
browsers and all plug-ins. I think that means no common API, but I'm
not sure.

Douglas asks if there should be a standards process around the
add-on. Joshua doesn't think we need standards for convergence to
happen. He says "its pretty clear what others are doing for
extensibility and it's pretty easy for others to adopt it." Mike
doesn't think it makes sense to codify behaviors that we might want
to change later. We don't know enough to create standards yet.

The Web is under attack by proprietary platforms like Air,
Silverlight, etc. They have clear and obvious advantages but they
have one big disadvantage: their lack of openness. Nick says that we
need to accelerate the inclusion of the capabilities of these closed
platforms in open standards and browsers. "We need more stuff in the
browser faster." Mike says that the competition of Web browsers has
led to improvements like Javascript being 10x faster now. Joshua
thinks that stories about the threat to the Web are highly
overrated. The Web has made great strides over the last few years.

Joshua says that no one controls enough of the market to have veto power, so everyone
needs to work together.

Douglas: the biggest threat to openness is mobile. Mobile platforms
have been trying to lock into closed systems since it's inception.
Now they're moving to the Web, but trying to make the mobile Web
something different in order to control it. Nick thinks that the
trends are toward open platforms for the Web (references iPhone and
Android). This is the right direction. Mike says that we need to
continue to improve the mobile experience so that it's the same as
the non-mobile web.

Joshua thinks there's some wishful thinking
there because with a cell phone the company that supplies bandwidth
controls the physical infrastructure. Without rules that require
carriers to allow competing backend services, they will continue to
create walled gardens. Mike argues that as mobile platforms get more
capable it will be more and more difficult for service providers to
lock users into their own services.